It’s been an odd year, what with the flooding of our house at the beginning. Things are much better at the end. I seem to have taken a lot of shots this year, perhaps because of the flooding, and the need to itemize the damage, or perhaps because of our big trips to Israel and

It’s taken me a while to put together my favorite shots on Flickr that I posted in 2013. This is an annual tradition that I’ve had going for a decade now, which I guess makes Flickr one of the longer-running services that I still use. I’m not sure what I can learn last year’s photos.

Today we lost the beautiful European oak floorboards from downstairs. Each was torn up, then the panels and styrene were taken out to leave just the sub floor. All the nails holding the floorboards down seemed to have reacted to the water from the Thames, producing a black residue. 2014.01.23 Nail by rbanks.

Maddie took off on her bicycle this week. She used a balance bike for quite a few months, to the point where she could coast along on it for a long way with her feet off the ground. Then two goes on her new bike, without stabilizers, and she told me to “let go” and

Many cities in the UK are surrounded by acres of protected land that form Greenbelts. They are what makes my house feel almost like it’s in the countryside, although it’s actually only 15 miles as the crow flies from the bustle of Trafalgar Square. Greenbelts are the result of policies created in the 1930s to

Bit unnerving to find this in amongst my RSS feeds. Here’s a map of where the incident happened. I’ve circled in red where my Dad used to work, and where we’d park our car before heading into London at the weekends. This is still not far from where we live. Planes taking off from Heathrow

Cool! A little home experimentation with our cat, Sidney, seems in order… ” In their experiment — pictured below — they had a cat step halfway over a small barrier, at which point they distracted it with food. They lowered the barrier while it was eating, but when the cat moved on, it still raised its